Local cancer research efforts draw $4 million in funding

Cancer research can feel like walking around in a dark room trying to find a light switch, said Rong Li, a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

“You know that there is a light in the room and you know that there has to be some switch there to turn that light on,” he said in a recent interview.

After seven years of groping in the darkness, Li and a team of scientists at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center, or CTRC, have found a way to switch on a protein that could inhibit the growth of tumors in “triple-negative breast cancer,” a particularly aggressive form of the disease that lacks targeted treatment options.

The group, which is partnering with scientists at the University of Texas at San Antonio, recently received close to $2 million in grant money from the Cancer Prevention & Research Institite of Texas, or CPRIT.

Another CTRC team, led by professor of obstetrics and gynecology Ratna Vadlamudi, also recived a grant just shy of $2 million from CPRIT to develop a drug that could prevent breast cancer cells’ ability to resist drug treatments.

Li’s team is preparing for pre-clinical trials on a drug that has been clinically tested for its ability to relieve the symptoms of hot flashes but which also might contain the right compounds to “turn on the anti-tumor activity” of an estrogen receptor called ER beta, which is present in about half of triple-negative breast cancers, Li said.

The group will also design, test, and screen other compounds that could do the same thing.

“If we can rally that anti-tumor activity of ER beta, then it could be a very promising therapy,” Li said.

A significant proportion of breast cancers are estrogen dependent, fueled by the presence of the hormone, he said. Targeted therapies often work to suppress estrogen and thus dial back the growth of harmful cells. These types of cancers have an estrogen receptor called ER alpha.

Triple-negative breast cancer, by definiton, lacks this kind of receptor and can’t be treated by the same hormone therapy — but some have the ER beta receptor, which Li calls “the cinderella sister.”

“It behaves in many ways like ER alpha but one particular feature of ER beta is that instead of promoting tumor growth, it inhibits it,” he said.

For seven years his team — including longtime collaborator and postdoctoral fellow Qinong Ye and in the past few years Stanton McHardy, a co-principal investigator and medicinal chemistry core director at the Center for Innovation in Drug Discovery — has been looking to see whether the receptor has a “switch” that could control the anti-tumor characteristic.

The group not only has found the switch, it knows how to flip it on, Li said. Now it’s ready to test it.

“I will say that this is still at the early stage of drug development but we have a pretty high confidence that our laboratory discovery will lay out a very solid foundation and give us a very feasible molecular handle to unleash or rally the anti-tumor activity there,” he said.

Collaborating on Vadlamudi’s grant are the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas.

“The funding will help us develop these first-in-class cancer therapy drugs that address the critical need of targeting therapy resistance and metastasis of breast cancer,” Vadlamudi said in a press release.

His work focuses on the “mechanisms in treatment-resistant cells,” according to the release. Because patients can develop a resistance to anti-estrogen targeted therapies, making it easier for tumors to mutate, Vadlamudi and his team have developed a small-molecule drug that could block or prevent drug resistance. The CPRIT grant will help researchers prepare the drug for clinical trials in patients.

Both grants will fund research and science experiments for the next three years.

“This is a tangible confirmation of the exceptional merit of the science and clinical care provided by our CTRC scienctists and physicians,” said CTRC director Ian M. Thompson.

Maria Luisa Cesar graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009. She began working in the editorial department of the San Antonio Express-News in May 2011. Her job was to connect with readers and help edit letters for the Letters to the Editor section.

After chasing a lead she found buried in the handwritten letter of an 87-year-old woman, she unofficially began carving out a beat for herself and kept gently reminding editors that she was hungry for experience and wanted to report full time.

She was offered a promotion in November 2011 and has been covering education since then, focusing on accountability and early childhood education. She also covers the San Antonio, Alamo Heights, Southside and Southwest independent school districts.